Ten Ways the World will End

Whether it took more than a four point five billion years to reach here, it would however take much less time to end. Doomsday is big concern for astronomers and a favorite with fiction writers and film-makers alike. After all, what could be more thrilling than an action-packed global apocalypse, narrowly averted at the last moment. However here we look upon the 10 ways which can be strongly responsible for end of our home.

10. A giant Asteroid Impact

Responding to challenges to the hypothesis that an asteroid impact caused a mass extinction on Earth 65 million years ago, a panel of 41 scientists re-analyzed data and provided new evidence, concluding that an impact in Mexico was indeed the cause of the mass extinction . This asteroid was about 10 to 12 km in diameter, which is large, but less than 0.2% the diameter of the Earth. It’s pretty unremarkable, and makes it a pretty typical minor asteroid. For comparison, this makes it about half the size of the known asteroid Gaspra. The thing that makes this asteroid so vicious, though, is that it had so much kinetic energy when it hit the planet! The great trick here is realizing that the asteroid gets pulled in by the Sun, and that — by the law of conservation of energy. NASA detects and tracks asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground and space-based telescopes.

For a real chill, Kuiper belt, a zone near Neptune, contains roughly 100,000 asteroids > 50 miles in diameter. The Kuiper belt sends a steady rain of small comets earthward. Impacts might occur over the ocean, and small over land might affect unpopulated areas. But with big asteroids, it doesn’t matter much where they land. Objects more than a half-mile wide- which strike Earth every 250,000 years or so- would touch off firestorms followed by global cooling from dust kicked up by the impact or they would simply end in breaking the earth into pieces.

Damage: Global destruction

Preventable: Evitable. Identify the potential risks, then blow them up or push them out of the way.

9. Robots Take Over

Robots we might see them as mindless objects to our orders. So how about an airplane with an autopilot? BBC reported of a a humanoid robot that learns to walk itself. Hans Moravec, one of the founders of the robotics department of Carnegie Mellon University, remains a believer. By 2040, he predicts, machines will match human intelligence, and perhaps human consciousness. Then they’ll get even better. He envisions an eventual symbiotic relationship between human and machine, with the two merging into “postbiologicals” capable of vastly expanding their intellectual power. Marvin Minsky, an artificial-intelligence expert at MIT, foresees a similar future. Soon we will have house-robots to do domestic chores.

What we can conclude is that their microchip might get dominant over the weak human mind because of the limitations of human memory and wisdom, they might say no to slavery and the artificial intelligence which is beyond any limit may take over and become homicidal since there will be no future of ethics with these machines and if they build a von Neumann machine which is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of potentially sextillions of machines.

Damage: Who knows what the hell their microchip brain will think?

Preventable : Yea, Stop making such stupid machines.

8. Bioweapons and Monstrous Epidemics

Germs and people have always coexisted, but occasionally the balance gets out of whack. Plague is a deadly infectious disease caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis (Pasteurella pestis). Scientists hold great concern that we might get a deadly monster plague from new bacteria that are formed consistently either by evolution or biotechnological mishaps. Old diseases such as cholera and measles have developed new resistance to antibiotics. Intensive agriculture and land development is bringing humans closer to animal pathogens. The plague has caused death of every 4th person in Europe 14th century epidemic. Moreover, old diseases have formed resistance to drugs available because of their constant evolution and remodeling and these strains have also evolved their life cycles becoming rapidly growing and spreading. And some biologists are of strong opinion that such a germ might come from outer space or a bio weapon accident may cause species extinction

Damage: Runny noses and rotten bodies

Preventable: yes if you discover new drugs or else forget it.

7. Geomagnetic Reversal

Earth’s magnetic field is approximately a magnetic dipole, with the magnetic field S pole near the Earth’s geographic north pole and the other magnetic field N pole near the Earth’s geographic south pole. Based upon the study of lava flows of basalt throughout the world, it has been proposed that the Earth’s magnetic field dwindles or reverses at intervals, ranging from tens of thousands to many millions of years, with an average interval of approximately 300,000 years. However, the last such event, called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, is observed to have occurred some 780,000 years ago.

The earth’s magnetic field protects the earth from cosmic radiations and subatomic particles from space as well as the solar wind. Without such protection we will end up in stone-age and by the way our compasses won’t work anymore either. Worse, the strength of our magnetic field has decreased about 5 percent in the past century.

Damage: Erosion of the already harassed ozone layer and radiation damage to eyes, skin and genes.

Preventable: not preventable unless you have seen the Hollywood movie Core.

6. Alien Invasion

There are about a hundred billion galaxies having a 100 billion stars being revolved around by multiple planets. Its hard to believe that no life form exists in not even one of them. At the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California scientists sieve through a telltale signal from an alien civilization. So far, in vain. Now suppose the long-sought message arrives. As seen in the video which is a proof of Alien’s visit in the past, what if they decide to come here again? People argument that even if they exist then they might be living some billion galaxies away, they will not be able to reach but i say if they are intelligent life forms then they might be a million years ahead of us, they might know teletransportation which is traveling at speed faster than light perhaps and then any science-fiction devotee can tell you what could go wrong.

Humans might friendly accept their visit and a direct conflict might not occur but what if the aliens might want resources from our Earth like humans wanted from Pandora in Avatar? Perhaps, they want a hold of Earth’s water for refilling a fusion-powered spacecraft and swat us aside if we get in the way. Aliens might might import with them pests or fatal viruses with a taste for human flesh or accidentally upset the solar system while carrying out some grandiose interstellar construction project. Most advanced civilizations have a destructive effect on the primitive ones, what if it happens to us?

Damage: Humanity swatted by aliens, pests killed the remaining.

Preventable: Preventable if we run into a a parallel universe and find a parallel earth that might easily inhabit us, otherwise forget it!

4 Responses to “Ten Ways the World will End”

10. Not a question of if but when, really.
9. Here’s the thing: Why would the robots kill us all?
8. Plausible.
7. Those things don’t last nearly long enough to cause the apocalypse.
6. So many problemss with it, I won’t bother to list them, instead I’ll just refer you to my answer to #9.
5. “Extinction of the weaker”? Just because there’s something better than us doesn’t mean we’re suddenly not good enough to survive.
4. That’s billions of years from now, I’m not too worried. And as for global warming: That’s about a new Ice Age, not the end of the universe.
3. Not entirely sure how I feel about this one. While there are a lot of countries with nukes that aren’t exactly all friends, then again, the dangers of large-scale nuclear warfare may be well-known enough to act as a deterrent.
2. See #10.
1. Warn me about this when Mars starts heading towards us.